Book Review: "Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century"

Near the end of Christian Caryl's eye-opening account of global
change, the author makes a return trip to Shenzhen, a city on the Chinese
mainland just north of Hong Kong. After taking the elevator to the observation
deck on the sixty-ninth floor of the Diwang Mansion, the city's tallest
building at the time — he is careful to stipulate it might not hold that title
for long— Caryl strolls through an historical exhibit until he is face to face
with, "a remarkable sight: Deng Xiaoping and Margaret
Thatcher are having a chat. The two life size wax figures. . . sit in armchairs
against a backdrop photomontage: Beijing’s Forbidden City behind Deng's head,
Hong Kong behind Thatcher's. Two pots of tea sit on the table between
them."

A plaque dispels the mystery about this seemingly surreal
tableau, which commemorates the 1984 agreement between Deng and Thatcher to
return Hong Kong to Chinese rule. But for Caryl the waxwork points to something
deeper, including, to start with, the astonishing transformation of Shenzhen.

In 1979, Shenzhen was a sleepy village, folded into the
"usual South China landscape". A visitor who made it past
"scowling border guards wearing uniforms adorned with the emblems of the
People's Republic of China" would be greeted to vistas of "rice
paddies, worked by peasants and their water buffalo in the time-honored manner,
and duck ponds." By the time of Caryl's visit, however, a few decades later,
Shenzhen and the surrounding area housed "a larger manufacturing workforce
than the entire United States."

In the West, we think of Shenzhen, if at all, as the site
where workers assemble Apple Ipods under, so it is charged, atrocious conditions.
Caryl makes no reference to these charges but does supply historical context:
Shenzhen's status as manufacturing powerhouse stems directly from "reforms
that Deng and his party comrades unleashed in 1979". These, in turn, have
been characterized as the "largest poverty-reduction program in human
history."

In 1979, Deng, recently returned from the punishment and
exile that was his lot during the Cultural Revolution, began to relieve China
from Mao's crushing aversion to private property and economic initiative; in
particular, he authorized Special Economic Zones, of which Shenzhen was one.
1979 was also the year Margaret Thatcher became England's Prime Minister. It
may seem at first that the year — 1979 — provides only the barest of links
between Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping. Yet by the time readers encounter the
Deng-Thatcher waxwork, Strange Rebels will likely have made them more than
ready to entertain the notion that — without for a moment discounting
irreducible differences between China and England — Margaret Thatcher might
well be conceived of as a sort of English Deng Xiaoping, and Deng Xiaoping as a
sort of Chinese Thatcher.

Thatcher came to power challenging the Laborite consensus
that had gripped England since World War II and had begun, in the eyes of
enough voters to ensure her a long tenure in office, to stifle the country. Did
she inflict unnecessary suffering as she tried to free England from the dictate
of labor unions and to encourage private initiative? Vehement debate about
that, of course, continues. Caryl, however, is concerned to point out that Thatcher's
influence extended well beyond England. "Thatcherism", he writes,
became a "clearly identifiable global brand. . . the face of the market
counterrevolution that swept the world", with resonance in "places
ranging form Latin America to Eastern Europe."

That there was a such market counterrevolution is one of the
themes of this book. Thatcher confronts labor unions and welfare state
tradition for control of England. Deng Xiaoping and his comrades confront
Maoist dogma. But Caryl would invite others to a tea party thrown in honor of
1979. Ayatollah Khomeini would be on the guest list as well, 1979 being the
year he returned from exile in Paris after the shah fled Teheran,

Some of the strongest passages in Strange Rebels pertain to
the retooling of Islam by the likes of Khomeini. Blindsided and treated as
nearly impotent by the seemingly irresistible forces of modernization and
secularization, Khomeini and others taught Islam to assimilate aspects of
Marxism, to appropriate the language of world revolution, and to announce it had
better answers, "to the problems of modern life than Marxism or liberal
democracy." Some of this transmutation of Islam happened in Paris, where
Muslim leaders lived in exile. One, Ali Shariati, an influence on Khomeini,
avidly read "Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara, Mao and. . . General
Giap" before returning to his favorite "mystic poets". He
engaged in polemics with Franz Fanon that led him to conclude that Islam,
"in fact, was the original path to a revolution that would end in a
perfect, classless society unified in adoration of the One God. Marx, by
comparison, was a pale Johnny-come-lately." The jails of Teheran were
another key transfer point. Communists and Shiite opponents of the shah, both
tortured by his secret police, fought and debated there. Shiites came out of it
with a grasp of Leninist discipline and organization.

With the hostage crisis, Khomeini presented Islamism as the
aggressive force we now know it to be, complete with its signature weapon
— suicide bombing, as employed by Iranian troops against Saddam Hussein’s
invading armies in that inglorious war. How little the West was prepared to
appreciate resurgent Islam can be seen in President Carter's inability to
describe Khomeini as anything other than "mentally ill."

The guest list for Caryl's tea party a la 1979 grows
stranger still. Nor is Khomeini the only spiritual authority to be invited.
Pope John Paul II would be welcome as well. His historic visit to Poland in
1979 served notice on Communist rule, even if it did so without wavering from a
policy of strict nonviolence. Caryl suggests that the nonviolence marking the
Fall of Communism, a decade later, owed much to the lasting influence of John
Paul's teaching.

Of course, when Communism fell, it had been weakened not
only by the Polish Pope, but by wounds on the battlefield from which it never
recovered. In 1979 the Red Army began its invasion of Afghanistan. Caryl
writes: "Very few people in the international elite suspected that Islam
was capable of posing a fundamental challenge to the global order — and
certainly not in a place as backward and marginal as Afghanistan." The
defeat of Soviet forces in Afghanistan meant they could not, with anything like
the old Stalinist aplomb, be deployed to crush the revolts against Communist
rule that broke out in Eastern Europe in 1989.

This tea party a la 1979 might not last very long or arrive
at anything like consensus. The guests are too disparate. They are united, all
of them, only by representing forces that had been deemed outdated, exhausted,
passé. It is tempting to write them off as reactionaries. Caryl would not
object to the term. On the contrary, he concludes that, "if the
experiences of 1979 suggest one conclusion, it is that we should never
underestimate the powers of reaction."

With its sweep and intelligence, Strange Rebels is not a
book readers are likely to forget.